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I was on Gmail with a custom domain for a good 7 years or so and in this last year I switched to iCloud mail and have been happy with it. I trust apple more than I do google when it comes to email privacy. And I think what really pulled me over to having apple host my mail is the private relay feature which is super cool.
Do you use it in windows or just apple devices? If so, does it give you any pain using it outside the apple ecosystem?
Both. I mainly check my email on my iPhone but on my PC I have it setup in the Outlook application (the one that’s part of MS Office). Never have any issues when I’m on the PC accessing it.
do you use the basic plan or have you upgraded to 50gb on Apple Mail?
I’m on their 200GB plan
the better question is - how do you transfer out of Google Mail to anything else after 15 years of usage of this mail? at this point even if Im willing to, I just can't, too many places to be transferred.
I managed to do so very easy. I set up my google mail in my iPad (in apples own mail app). I then also set up my iCloud mail. I waited for my whole account to download all of my gmail emails (like 20 years of mails). Then I just selected all and moved them into iCloud inbox. The mails were in my iCloud inbox (on iPad) nearly instantly, I was really amazed. Of course it took its time until it was all synced to my iCloud Storage and then downloaded to my phone, but it worked pretty easy actually. And it even got all the dates from my old mails right. Couldn’t have worked any better!
Edit: oh and I did this for 3 gmail accounts now. When I was done, I set up email forwarding to apples „hide my mail“ feature in all of them and selected delete gmail mail version after forwarding. This way I still get mails sent to my old mail accounts, without google knowing my new iCloud mail. Definitely recommend this.
oh, that edit tip is quite a good one, to set up the forward for the @gmail account to @icloud. that way I wouldn't have to visit every place the mail was used to change it. however, it would be still good to do the full transition some day :D
Set your reply to email address to your iCloud email and add a like in your signature to get people to update their address book with your new email.
You will still need to log into each web service and change your email over though. At that point, might as well use “hide my email” for all of those web services (or to anyone really).
Maybe setup a rule so that all emails arrive to you via the forward from gmail will go into a different folder for you to review. At least for a bit. Maybe after a month or 2. You can fully transition over
BTW… If your Apple ID is linked to something other than an iCloud Mail keep in mind that you won’t be able to switch to an iCloud mail address as primary address for your Apple ID. I did all this transition last week and spoke to apple for like an hour. They told me there is no way to switch. So now my gmail is like the user name for my Apple ID, every mail that is sent to gmail now gets forwarded to an hide my mail email. The problem was, that „hide my mail“ mails get normally forwarded to your primary Apple ID Mail address, in my case the gmail address. So what I did now was creating an iCloud mail over my iPhone‘s iCloud settings and then went to iCloud.com on my browser, where you then are able to switch the „hide my mails“ recipient address to the just created iCloud mail. Pretty complicated solution, but the only way to at least kind of get rid of my gmail address…
strange this should work fairly easy: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8562259
Hmm… If i am Reading this right, my problem could have been, that my iCloud mail wasn’t created more than 30days ago. I will definitely try that.
I just wonder why apple support didn’t came up with that…
I will update once I tried (iCloud email is currently about 6/7 days old, so I will have to wait a while)
Oh and Thanks for that suggestion!
I literally switched my Apple ID from my gmail email address to my Apple @me.com email address today
@lackthought how did the switch go? Any friction or speed bumps?
it was smooth for me, I went to this address:
https://appleid.apple.com/account/manage
- Signed in with my existing gmail Apple ID
- clicked the Apple ID link to change my address
- entered my @me.com address
- grabbed the verification code from my email
and that was pretty much it, now I can sign in with my @me address for Apple ID
I didn't even need to log out on any of my devices, they display the @me address in the settings as my Apple ID instead of the gmail address
@lackthought, that sounds straight forward and easy. You ditching Google completely or just changing login?
trying to ditch google entirely
I already changed about a dozen services from my gmail address to my @me address, but I have a ton more I need to track down
I also set gmail to forward all emails to my @me address so I can monitor stragglers since I anticipate I will be getting emails to gmail for a while still
Fire up your email client, and add your Gmail account (doesn’t matter if it’s IMAP or a Google-specific connection method, just don’t use POP3 or webmail). Control-A to select all messages in a folder. Drag and drop them somewhere else.
Source: I did this years ago when I left Google for self-hosted email. Moved all my messages into Thunderbird. Tested backups. Never looked back.
Still using my gmail from the early days. Would like to use iCloud but switching would cause a lot of pain I feel. So many accounts using this address. Nowadays I use apples generated email addresses but even those redirect to the gmail address so..
but can't you just redirect all the google stuff to apple mail and then change the mail for every important service?
It's like moving when you ask the postal service to send your stuff to your new adress, so you won't lose anything
That would be possible. It just wouldn’t change a lot in my case. Mails would still be on the Google server or at least processed by them if I’d delete them after redirecting. And I don’t use the gmail client but spark. Moving would just be for the sake of the data not being in googles hands anymore.
Maybe I’ll just have to plan in some time on the weekend and go through all of my services..
Edit: sry didn’t read properly. Yes I could redirect an then move.
Used to use Gmail, moved over to Icloud mail when I made the switch to Apple. I love how it scans the mail to add any event into my calendar if I want it to.
Sometimes a wee bit temperamental though
what do you mean by that ?
Temperamental? Like sometimes I would get an email and it wouldn’t show on the app but if I logged in to iCloud in the web it would be there. Also sometimes it hangs when refreshing but these problems seem to be less than previously.
The search function on the apple mail app on phone is absolutely dreadful. I always have to go to gmail to search again. Otherwise I’d be happy to jump
I wrote a whole thing on this, but tldr; I switched from Gmail to iCloud about a year ago. Gmail is better at filters, search, web UI, and spam filtering. iCloud is better at native UI, offline support, and ecosystem integration.
Overall I’m happy with it but only because I’m willing to pay the costs for the benefits, which I think is pretty rare.
@avater I’m trying to leave google at all but there’s always something that stuck me like google photos and drive. Drive is a minor problem, the big issue is photos.
Just so you're aware, Google Photos doesn't export EXIF location data, nor does it allow you to export the full resolution of your images. This is a huge issue! See: Google Photos Limitations
iCloud Mail doesn't have any advanced features, but it works great, it has no ads, it's form a company with a good reputation, and it's very cheap.
If the feature set has what you need, there really isn't anything better (unless you pay a lot more).
I switched from Gmail to iCloud and from iCloud to Fastmail. Couldn't be happier. Give it a try.
Gmail’s auto and manual tagging system is better and easier to use than iCloud’s folders and archive is better in gmail where it’s basically just another folder on iCloud. iCloud doesn’t have ads though and better supports custom domains.
I just switched to iCloud from gmail so we will see if iCloud grows on me
How good is the search feature in iCloud mail? How does it compare to gmail? Can you quickly and accurately find stuff?
I’ve almost finished transition to iCloud. No issues at all. I value my privacy more and more and with news google is going to train their LLMs on your content it was a no brainer for me.
Do you have a source for that last bit? Not doubting, just genuinely want to learn about this if true.
Yeah this is also my concern at the moment
Disroot is a better provider than those two.
I haven’t used gmail in years, but I switched my domain email from O365 to iCloud about a year ago to save a few dollars a month (already have iCloud+ 200gb). Pretty much just works how I expect email to, haven’t had any issues. I used Apple Mail already on my devices so same UI and everything for me.
I prefer my mail provider doesn’t data mine my email to sell me products.
worst thing about icloud mail is the terrible junk filtering which you literally cannot disable and always has false positives. best you can do is set up a rule to move junk to inbox.
best thing is hide my email
I use iCloud mail because everything I own is Apple. You just can’t beat how it syncs between my phone, Watch, iPad & MacBook. FWIW, the native mail app is the only one that can compose a new email from scratch on an Apple Watch. I’m all in with Apple services.
iCloud Mail 🏆